The Age of Innocence--Edith Wharton [56]
‘‘That is the Countess Olenska—a granddaughter of old Mrs. Mingott’s.’’
‘‘Whew—a countess!’’ whistled Ned Winsett. ‘‘Well, I didn’t know countesses were so neighbourly. Mingotts ain’t.’’
‘‘They would be, if you’d let them.’’
‘‘Ah, well—’’ It was their old interminable argument as to the obstinate unwillingness of the ‘‘clever people’’ to frequent the fashionable, and both men knew that there was no use in prolonging it.
‘‘I wonder,’’ Winsett broke off, ‘‘how a countess happens to live in our slum?’’
‘‘Because she doesn’t care a hang about where she lives—or about any of our little social signposts,’’ said Archer with a secret pride in his own picture of her.
‘‘H’m—been in bigger places, I suppose,’’ the other commented. ‘‘Well, here’s my corner. So long.’’
He slouched off across Broadway, and Archer stood looking after him and musing on his last words.
Ned Winsett had those flashes of penetration; they were the most interesting thing about him, and always made Archer wonder why they had allowed him to accept failure so stolidly at an age when most men are still struggling.
Archer had known that Winsett had a wife and child, but he had never seen them. The two men always met at the Century, or at some haunt of journalists and theatrical people, such as the restaurant where Winsett had proposed to go for a bock. He had given Archer to understand that his wife was an invalid; which might be true of the poor lady, or might merely mean that she was lacking in social gifts or in evening clothes, or in both. Winsett himself had a savage abhorrence of social observances: Archer, who dressed in the evening because he thought it cleaner and more comfortable to do so, and who had never stopped to consider that cleanliness and comfort are two of the costliest items in a modest budget, regarded Winsett’s attitude as part of the boring ‘‘Bohemian’’ pose that always made fashionable people, who changed their clothes without talking about it, and were not forever harping on the number of servants one kept, seem so much simpler and less self-conscious than the others. Nevertheless, he was always stimulated by Winsett, and whenever he caught sight of the journalist’s lean, bearded face and melancholy eyes he would rout him out of his corner and carry him off for a long talk.
Winsett was not a journalist by choice. He was a pure man of letters, untimely born in a world that had no need of letters; but after publishing one volume of brief and exquisite literary appreciations, of which one hundred and twenty copies were sold, thirty given away, and the balance eventually destroyed by the publishers (as per contract) to make room for more marketable material, he had abandoned his real calling and taken a sub-editorial job on a woman’s weekly, where fashion plates and paper patterns alternated with New England love stories and advertisements of temperance drinks.
On the subject of Hearth Fires (as the paper was called) he was inexhaustibly entertaining; but beneath his fun lurked the sterile bitterness of the still young man who has tried and given up. His conversation always made Archer take the measure of his own life and feel how little it contained; but Winsett’s, after all, contained still less, and though their common fund of intellectual interests and curiosities made their talks exhilarating, their exchange of views usually remained within the limits of a pensive dilettantism.
‘‘The fact is, life isn’t much a fit for either of us,’’ Winsett had once said. ‘‘I’m down and out; nothing to be done about it. I’ve got only one ware to produce, and there’s no market for it here, and won’t be in my time. But you’re free and you’re well off. Why don’t you get into touch? There’s only one way to do it: to go into politics.’’
Archer threw his head back and laughed. There one saw at a flash the unbridgeable difference between men like Winsett and the others—Archer’s kind. Everyone in polite circles knew that, in America, ‘‘a gentleman couldn’t go into